Osage veteran selected for Honor Flight to Washington, D.C.
Terry Don Buckles, a Marine Corps corporal in Vietnam, was selected for the Honor Flight for veterans and flew to Washington, D.C. on May 18 and toured the U.S. Capitol.
Terry Don Buckles (seated in wheelchair), a Marine Corps corporal in Vietnam, was selected for the Honor Flight for veterans and flew to Washington, D.C. on May 18 and toured the U.S. Capitol. Courtesy Photo
When Terry Don Buckles boarded an airplane on May 18 to head to Washington, D.C., he was in for a surprise.
He’d waited for years to be on the Honor Flight for veterans, but he didn’t know that schoolchildren from his hometown of Forest City, Mo., had written a stack of letters thanking him for those four years he spent as a Marine Corps corporal in Vietnam – sometimes, he said, “a little too far north in Vietnam.”
“We’re a small community, so I know their folks and grandfolks,” Buckles said of the schoolkids’ letters he read on the plane “Each one of them was touching.”
Buckles was in the Marines from 1964 to 1968, stationed at Dong Ha, the northernmost base and just about spitting distance from the enemy forces. Like a lot of veterans, he’s not keen on talking about what he saw and experienced: “The good memories are when sometimes you get really silly, and the bad ones you try not to remember or talk about.”
Buckles was born in Pawnee and has lived in Forest City since he was 14 days old. He is the grandson of original allottee Gurney Miller of Fairfax and son of Theresa Miller Buckles. His brother, Mark Goad, lives in Fairfax.
Terry Don Buckles, a Marine Corps corporal in Vietnam, was selected for the Honor Flight for veterans and flew to Washington, D.C. on May 18 and toured the U.S. Capitol. Courtesy Photos
After his tour with the Marine Corps working in motor transportation, he drove trucks for 30 years, then worked another 10 for a transportation company, doing maintenance, pushing snow and whatever else was needed.
Fifty-seven years ago, he married his wife, Darith, “an English gal as pretty as she can be,” he said. “Everybody knows she’s the boss.”
They have three children, five grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.
“My great-grandson Jackson is the one that they say looks like me,” Buckles said. “I get puffed up every time I say that.”
The Honor Flight to D.C. was grueling – they flew there and back from Kansas City in one day, toured the city and several memorials.
“The highlight for me was seeing the Capitol and the Iwo Jima Memorial,” he said. “The Honor Flight was very well organized. They treated us like kings, they really did.”
Louise Red Corn has been a news reporter for 34 years and a photographer for even longer. She grew up in Northern California, the youngest child of two lawyers, her father a Pearl Harbor survivor who later became a state judge and her mother a San Francisco native who taught law at the University of California at Davis.
After graduating from the U.C. Berkley with a degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures with no small amount of coursework in Microbiology, she moved to Rome, Italy, where she worked as a photographer and wordsmith for the United Nation’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, specializing in the French-speaking countries of Africa.
When the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl parked over Rome in 1986, she escaped to New York City to work for the international editions of Time Magazine. She left Time for Knight-Ridder newspapers in Biloxi, Miss., Detroit and Lexington, Ky., During nearly 20 years with Knight-Ridder, she was a stringer (freelancer) for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Parade Magazine.
In 2004, she married Raymond Red Corn and moved to Oklahoma, where she worked for the Tulsa World before she bought the weekly newspaper in Barnsdall and turned a tired newspaper into the award-winning Bigheart Times, which she sold in 2018. She hired on at the Osage News in early 2022.
Throughout her career she has won dozens of state, national and international journalism awards.
Red Corn is comfortable reporting on nearly any topic, the more complex the better, but her first love is covering courts and legal issues. Her proudest accomplishment was helping to exonerate a Tennessee man facing the death penalty after he was wrongfully charged with capital murder in Kentucky, a state he had never visited.
Louise Red Corn has been a news reporter for 34 years and a photographer for even longer. She grew up in Northern California, the youngest child of two lawyers, her father a Pearl Harbor survivor who later became a state judge and her mother a San Francisco native who taught law at the University of California at Davis.
After graduating from the U.C. Berkley with a degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures with no small amount of coursework in Microbiology, she moved to Rome, Italy, where she worked as a photographer and wordsmith for the United Nation’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, specializing in the French-speaking countries of Africa.
When the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl parked over Rome in 1986, she escaped to New York City to work for the international editions of Time Magazine. She left Time for Knight-Ridder newspapers in Biloxi, Miss., Detroit and Lexington, Ky., During nearly 20 years with Knight-Ridder, she was a stringer (freelancer) for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Parade Magazine.
In 2004, she married Raymond Red Corn and moved to Oklahoma, where she worked for the Tulsa World before she bought the weekly newspaper in Barnsdall and turned a tired newspaper into the award-winning Bigheart Times, which she sold in 2018. She hired on at the Osage News in early 2022.
Throughout her career she has won dozens of state, national and international journalism awards.
Red Corn is comfortable reporting on nearly any topic, the more complex the better, but her first love is covering courts and legal issues. Her proudest accomplishment was helping to exonerate a Tennessee man facing the death penalty after he was wrongfully charged with capital murder in Kentucky, a state he had never visited.
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